1992’s Demonic Toys is pure VHS hokum … and we mean that as a compliment!
Demonic Toys is a film that’s in a VERY rare classification of movies. It’s obviously a ripoff, but it’s a ripoff made by the people who are also responsible for the thing being ripped off in the first place. It’s basically an example of cinematic self-plagiarism, which really doesn’t *technically* count as plagiarism, but you know what we’re getting at here. Imagine the guy who made Child’s Play releasing a film called No Kidding Around about a demonic doll named Bucky. Well, that’s pretty much what Full Moon did with Demonic Toys — it’s literally the same premise as Puppet Master, only WAY sleazier and gorier.
I’m not sure how Full Moon found itself becoming a business propped up by evil action figure movies, but hey, if evil action figure movies are paying for your grotto in Spain, I guess you’ll keep making evil action figure movies. Sure, there are some key differences between Puppet Master and Demonic Toys, but the central ideas are completely interchangeable. Both movies are about an eclectic group of people getting trapped in an isolated environment, pursued by malicious supernatural force and murderous playthings doing what they do best — you know, murder people and stuff. But Puppet Master at least TRIED to keep things classy and somewhat dignified. Demonic Toys, on the other hand, makes no attempts to hide the fact that it’s a coarse, blood-soaked, highly profane exercise in B-movie depravity.
It’s MUCH bloodier than Puppet Master, it’s got more adult language than Puppet Master and it has substantially more smut and nudity than Puppet Master. At one point a character hallucinates that he’s seeing a totally naked model draped in an American flag — a sequence that has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the movie and seemingly only exists to inflate the film’s expose nipple quotient. In other words, Charles Band and pals knew exactly what they were going for here — and I’m sure a lot of viewers are going to enjoy this more than the first Puppet Master, if only for its preposterous excesses.
You don’t really need a whole lot of plot for a movie called Demonic Toys. But we actually have quite a bit of backstory wedged into the movie upfront. Within the first 15 minutes or so we’re already inundated with plot elements about gun smuggling rings, pregnant police officers and a pair of spooky, supernatural children and we’ve still got a fairly long way to go before we even get around to the Demonic Toys promised by the title.
The most surprising thing about Demonic Toys, ultimately, is who actually wrote it — David S. Goyer. Yes, years before he gave us The Dark Knight and Man of Steel he was cutting his teeth on straight to video fare like Arcade and Kickboxer 2. And Demonic Toys definitely has a stronger script than most films of its type from the era. The characters are relatively fleshed out, you get a lot of unexpected twists and turns and the dialogue is usually pretty great, especially whenever the villainous Baby Oopsy Daisy is saying all kinds of hilariously profane things. It’s certainly better than average stuff and it doesn’t feel as dated as you might expect. Of course, it’s overloaded with way too much melodramatic devil worship nonsense, but hey, nobody’s expecting Citizen Kane heading into a film like this, are they?
The killer toys themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. Outside of the previously mentioned Oopsy Daisy there’s not a whole lot of creativity to the character design. Like, there’s a killer jack in the box, a killer teddy bear, a couple of deadly toy soldiers, etc. It actually has far more in common with Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 than it does any of the Chucky movies … or the Puppet Master movies, for that matter. Thankfully, the trade off there is that we get a LOT of extremely bloody kills, which are surprisingly graphic and realistic considering the material. Throats are ripped out, eyeballs are plucked and later on, some really gruesome stuff happens.
The acting is pretty good and definitely better than you’d anticipate from a movie called Demonic Toys. Tracy Scoggins plays the heroine of the film while Bentley Mitchum (the real life grandson of Robert) plays the very unexpected male hero of the film … a fast food chicken delivery driver. The ensemble cast is rounded out by a really good supporting performance from Pete Schrum as a profanity loving security guard and a fairly decent one from Barry Lynch as the ringleader of the gun smuggling operation. And the more I think about it, you kinda have to wonder if Goyer was making some kind of cultural statement with the whole “real guns in a toy factory” motif. You can read into that a lot of different ways.
The movie torpedoes itself with too much story, though. The whole “unborn messiah of evil” subplot doesn’t make any sense at all and since the big bad of the movie can change forms at will, you’ll find yourself constantly confused by all of the action (and inaction) in Demonic Toys. You could probably take out two or three characters and erase ten minutes or so from the runtime and maybe you’d get a better movie. An easier to follow one, for sure.
As good as Goyer’s dialogue maybe, Demonic Toys still finds itself going through the motions in a lot of respects. It’s a predictable movie (whenever it isn’t confounding) and the conclusion is pretty disappointing. Plus, you have a really uncomfortable scene where Scoggins’ character is almost raped in some sort of Satanic rite and it’s just pure exploitative dreck for the sake of being pure exploitative dreck. Just eww.
Of course, Full Moon was quick to roll out a sequel (never mind 80 percent of the cast of this movie getting killed off.) Weirdly enough, it wasn’t a straight sequel but a crossover 1993 flick called Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, which also includes characters from Full Moon’s earlier film Bad Channels. Years later a “proper” Demonic Toys came out in 2010, hot on the heels of 2004’s Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, which was the most inevitable thing in the history of things being inevitable. And just so you know, we’ve gotten no less than FOUR Demonic Toys spinoffs this decade alone from director William Butler. Man, wouldn’t that be a great Final Jeopardy! question, huh?
Not all of Demonic Toys holds up, but a lot of it still does. You know exactly what kind of mood you have to be in for something like this to be palatable, and as far as early ‘90s evil toy movies go, you could do WAY worse. I mean, give me this over Dolly Dearest and Pinocchio’s Revenge any day.
